On the afternoon of January 25, 2012 around 5:30pm Pacific Time, the world's largest social network underwent a Denial of Service attack and service outages were reported in several countries.

It appears that the attack was widespread and lasted for at least twenty minutes, which is roughly equivalent to 3 weeks worth of information downtime in the Internet world and must have particularly annoyed a few social media addicts. Nevertheless, AnonSec has officially confirmed that the site underwent a Denial of Service Attack on its official Twitter account.

Facebook keeps track of its own API errors on its Platform Status Page, and we can see based on the graph below that the site experienced significant API responsiveness delays around the 5:30pm PST.

No information is currently known regarding the source behind the attack, and we will be following this developing story closely.

Blogging platform WordPress has been hit by a large DdoS which appears to have shut down some of its blogs.The attack began yesterday morning and lasted for about two hours. The DDoS attack was “multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.

It hit all three data centres in Chicago, San Antonio and Dallas. The site is back to normal now but while it was happening it was the “largest” the outfit has ever seen. While the attack appears to have subsided, WordPress is working with the upstream provider on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity.

The attack seemed to be aimed at a non-English blog and might have been politically motivated, WordPress things. Apparently the usual suspect, the hacking group Anonymous, does not have the manpower or bandwidth to launch a truly massive DDoS attack like this. A botnet with “high hundred-thousands to millions” of computers would be required for sustained attacks.

The Untouchables have swooped on the homes of people suspected of being members of Anonymous.

More than 40 search warrants were executed across the United States on Thursday, the bureau announced. This follows the arrest in the UK of five men who allegedly participated in the Anonymous group’s denial of service attacks on Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Amazon in mid-December.

Anonymous said its attacks were to punish financial-service companies’ who prohibited donations to Wikileaks. Amazon was also targeted after it kicked Wikileaks off its web-hosting service.

The FBI seems to want to make an example of those who conduct DDoS attacks. They say that it is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil liability,” the FBI said in a press release.

However the Untouchables did not seem to arrest anyone after the searches.

The Blighty government is placing sandbags around its servers, installing searchlights, barrage balloons and reading itself to fight script kiddies on the beaches. The UK fears that when it extradites Wikileaks Julian Assange to Sweden to face his accusers in a controversial sex case, the likes of 4Chan and Anonymous will "go mental".

To be fair to the government, there is nothing it can do. If it ignored Europe's extradition procedure and hung onto Assange, it would be giving the green light to every villian to move to blighty. There they can defend against extradition to their homeland on the basis that "if it is good enough for Assange it is good enough for a father stabbing, mother raping, drug dealer." So all Whitehall can do is shore of the defences and hope it can ride the coming storm.

Extra security measures have been added to a host of government web services, in particular those used to claim benefits or provide tax information. The theory is that the entire world of 4Chan will blitz blighty.

The anger of Assange's supporters is likely to be increased by a claim from his British lawyer yesterday that a grand jury has been secretly empanelled in Virginia to consider charges against the Australian over the diplomatic telegrams. Internet activists have already targeted the website of the Swedish judicial authorities bringing the sex charges allegations against Assange.

Whitehall is expecting a hack into databases or a distributed denial-of-service (DdoS) attack. Part of Whitehalls problem is a stupid Coalition government directive to "save money" by not updating Internet Explorer. Whitehall is now stuck with a geriatric version of IE which is so full of bugs that Microsoft does not want to have anything to do with it.

Of course the millions of pounds of damage that Anonymous will do thanks to this "saving" does not seem to have occurred to the Coalition. It would appear that Britain has not been so ably lead in a war since Lord Cardigan thought it was a good idea to charge his Light Brigade at the wrong guns during the Crimean war.

A spokesman for David Cameron's office said that the priority would be websites where we are dealing with information that belongs to members of the public. So if 4Chan attacks the databases or internal networks they will be unprotected.

There is little that Whitehall can do against a DoS attack on a website if it is determined enough.

Whistleblowing site Wikileaks hopes to duck loads of denial of service attacks by hiding in Amazon's cloud.

Wikileaks has been hit by several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The site was temporarily shutdown by the onslaught, but is functioning again after migrating its services to Amazon's cloud.

Wikileaks recently published thousands of confidential diplomatic cables that were sent between the US State Department and embassies around the world. The leaked documents shed light on US intelligence gathering efforts and reveal sensitive information pertaining to US foreign relations. The disclosure of the cables has proved embarrassing for the US and a number of other governments.

Wikileaks has announced that the DDoS was pummeling its servers at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, forcing its Swedish hosting provider to discontinue operation of the site Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure can handle massive DDoS attacks.